The will to doubt

by Alfred H. Lloyd

But can there be anything besides loss or decline? This again is our question, and the answer now comes quick and decisive, whether we are thinking of Machiavelli or the Sophists, of the old-time Pharisees, or of those in our own life. Decline and even fall never tell the whole story of anything, and just because they mean use, even secular use. That men must worship is surely true, but also men must and do use, and the use, in spite of the strain of the offence and resistance which it is sure to arouse, brings profit always. Use, secular use, may imply sacrifice of the letter or the established form, but it always leads to liberation of the spirit. In scepticism, therefore, and the coincident conventionalism and utilitarianism towards sacred things, in the institutionalism which harbours all these, though often darkly and secretly, we may always read, what in truth history has again and again exemplified, the throes of birth, the birth of the spirit. Must it not be that any visible institution, be it ecclesiastical or industrial or political or educational or ceremonial, just because an institution designed in some way to serve an active, growing life, is always an outgrown, falling institution? As in the case of the Roman Church in the days of Machiavelli, an institution upon its establishment actually justifies its enemies by its own practices, while the enemies, so justified, do but lay it bare, exposing its hidden thoughts and ways, forcing reform upon it, and perhaps in the end themselves "remaining to pray."

So is the spirit born, and so do we see in the personnel of society what a wonderful triumvirate, working for the real growth of human life with a power that nothing can resist, is made by the avowed sceptic, the loyalist, always secretly conventional and utilitarian, and the reformer, the great spiritual leader. Even Machiavelli in his most offensive pronouncements must have felt something between his lines which expressed would have transfigured their meaning, not to say also his reputation, greatly, and, consciously or unconsciously, he was certainly a party to the development of what is best in modern life. As for the Sophists, whether we see them as sceptics or conventionalists, did they not have Socrates among them? Between them and him, when all is said, the difference was only that between talent and genius, between great formal ingenuity, which always means opportunism, and really vital insight, which, shattering opportunism with its own weapons, means loyalty, not to existing forms, but to the spirit dwelling in the forms. Much in the same way, too, the Jewish Pharisees had Jesus, a contemporary, who did but recognize and earnestly teach what they were really practising, namely, the utility of the law, or the law for man, not man for the law. Only what for them was merely a selfish opportunity, absorbed as they were in the vested interests of their time and generation, was manifest to him—who was a genius and who used for real gain the talent which they hoarded—as a great spiritual fact, as a universal truth, bringing opportunity and freedom to all men under all law, not to some men under one law. Thus they were institutionalists; he, by merely turning their narrowness into a principle of all life, became a reformer, and, indebted to them as he was, he could forgive them even when they opposed him. Genius always forgives; the spirit always recalls and cherishes the letter that has given it birth.

So the institution as an historical fact, whether we see it with the eyes of Machiavelli or with those of a pope, with the eyes of Protagoras or with those of Socrates, with the eyes of the Pharisees or with those of Christ, may show worship turning into use, the sacred becoming secular, but it shows also the life of society becoming enriched; it shows investment for future gain; it shows doubt, not destroying anything, but achieving only what is real; it shows the life of the spirit.

III.

No period of man's earlier doubting can be more interesting than that of the centuries just prior to the Christian era, when the peoples of the Mediterranean contributed so much, directly and indirectly, to the preparation for Christianity and to the discovery, or revelation, which finally came and in due time changed the ancient to our modern world. What the preparation was has already been indicated, at least partially, in the references that have been made to the Sophists and to the Pharisees. Christianity has been only the interest, the earned increment, or rather should I not say the compounded principal, of the scepticism, of the formalism and the utilitarianism which beset the Greeks and the Hebrews, to mention no others, as their peculiar civilizations were merging into the larger and deeper life of a great empire. In their several lives the demand came, and came, too, from within, not merely from without, as in all life it must come, for use of their gathered treasures, whether spiritual or material, and the rise of Rome was but the result of that demand satisfied, of the use realized. As for the scepticism, this with all its incidents made the use possible, made it possible for the peoples to give or relinquish what they had to the larger life to which they all belonged, while the religion of Christianity spiritualized for them all the resulting empire.

Those wonderful races of the Mediterranean, who achieved—at least some of them—such great things in all that counts for civilization, became at the last most extravagant sceptics, not only formulating, but also very generally living up to, the conviction of ignorance and forgetfulness of reality. Everything which their long past had gathered for them they resigned—or let me say crucified—and themselves they threw, as if with an investor's recklessness, upon a world of chance or fate, upon a world seemingly of empty forms in all human relations, a world of disguises for license and of mere conceits of moral power and religious piety. Sensuous mysticism and pantheism, formalism of all kinds, Stoicism, Epicureanism, legalism, and cosmopolitanism were crosses upon which one people and another, one class and another, nailed their long-cherished devotions, their love of God and man and nature, of temple and family and country. A great doubting, then, was truly theirs. A great sacrificial offering was their preparation for Christianity. In a way, with a completeness that seems to have no parallel in history, they put their talents to the bankers—despairing, of course, but hoping also, if only their doubting, when it came, may be supposed as genuine as their earlier believing. From the North and from the East and from the South their good men came, and their rich and their wise, and laid what they had at the feet of the life that was new born.

People read their histories so differently. The pagan doubt, the Christian revelation and belief, the conversion of the pagan world to Christianity, the Renaissance, in which the conversion was in a sense reversed, and the Reformation mean such different things to different people. Some must still have it that paganism, or pre-Christianism, ended in absolutely blind despair, in the avowal of complete failure—as if such despair or failure could ever find words for its own utterance; that Christianity came into a hopelessly pagan world wholly from without, came into a world of nothing but unmixed doubt, and brought with it nothing but unmixed belief; that the conversion was a sort of conquest, by a power all its own capturing the pagans, so wholly unnerved as to be quite incapable even of a futile resistance; that the Renaissance, restoration as it was of the pagan life and thought, was at best a great condescension on the part of Christendom and at worst an unfortunate return to the pagan idols; and that in the Reformation the Christian Religion Militant did but retreat upon the Bible as its impregnable fortress. But such history can hardly be our history here. For us the rise and the progress of Christianity have had quite a different character. To strike at the foundation of that whole structure the pagan doubting was too articulate. It was, also, too earnest. It was too genuine. The races did indeed resign, as with an investor's recklessness, all that they had, but their recklessness was not unmixed. Their doubting had hope in it as well as despair. It still loved the spirit of what had been even when it betrayed the letter. It had its martyrs, too, as well as its suicides; its sense of life as well as its enervating fear of death. Say what you will, then, a great, warm, yearning belief dwelt within it. And so, just because the pagan doubting was too earnest and too genuine and too articulate, because it was, in truth, a great sacrificial offering, the crucifixion on Calvary was also too true to life at Athens and Alexandria, as well as to life at Jerusalem, and the resurrection of the spirit was too true to life at Rome; they were too true to mean anything but fulfilment and achievement. Everywhere, in every place and in every department of life, the letter had been rejected; but everywhere also—and this, nothing else, was the true conversion to Christianity—the spirit was accepted. Acceptance of the spirit, too, meant that in good time the letter would be restored, as indeed at the Renaissance it surely was.

Christianity, therefore, came when the times were ripe for it. It came not from without, but deeply from within the pagan life of the Mediterranean. Moreover, if in this way, not in that other way, we must read the rise of Christianity, then we must read both the Renaissance and the Reformation under the same light. The Renaissance, as was just said, brought a restoration of the letter; but, necessarily, of the letter under the light of the spirit, of the letter transfigured. The Renaissance, so dramatically manifested in the Crusades, was only Christendom returning to its birthplace. With its crusades to Jerusalem, to all the old capitals, to the pagan ideas and institutions, to the ancient languages and literatures, Christianity rediscovered itself in the past, winning back in this way some of its childhood, curing a homesickness that a worldly church had made it feel, securing for itself such a deep experience as comes to a man who, after years of wandering and forgetting, has returned to the home of his infancy. And as for the Reformation—if indeed this was a retreat, shall we say, of a defeated religion upon the Bible, its supposed impregnable fortress—we need only to remember the pagan origin, the Hebrew and the Greek inspiration, and the Roman atmosphere of that sacred book.

And of the relation of Christianity to paganism, just one thing more. The Christian revelation, so wonderfully portrayed and enacted in the life and character of Jesus, was only an idealization, a spiritual interpretation, of the very present, the thoroughly actual life of the time, of the life that the pagans, doubting but believing, despairing but also trusting, resigning all but hoping for more, had already brought upon themselves; a life of self-denial, of common, universal humanity, all men being "members one of another," and of perfect faith. Perhaps the self-denial was bravely concealed in an accepted subjection, but it was not less real. Perhaps the common humanity was military and imperial, yet it also was real. Perhaps, too, the faith was blind and fatalistic, but it was nevertheless faith. Can faith go farther or do more than fatalism? The pagans, then, had become Christians in fact or status, and Christianity came, breathing life into the bare fact, into the self-denial, and the broad humanity and the faith, and made these not the mere phases of bare fact or condition, but motives and ideals, manifesting them heroically in a single human life, and so in the form and with the power of a personal discovery of self.

Where genuine doubt is the God is always born.